Instead of publishing a correction he should have offered to sell people a collection of tapes outlining his quick and easy, money making, blogging system.

"Five years ago Ann Althouse was eating out of garbage cans. But with my easy-to-use system she learned how to convert pictures of dead plants and links to stories other people wrote into a money making enterprise. Now she spends all day on a yacht with her boy toy husband."

I was about to comment on how off Penn was, but then what about product bloggers? There are a whole lot of those. There are also spam-ish blogs that do nothing but redirect to buying products. What if you add those in? He's still likely way off but maybe less than those of us used to political and cultural blogging might think.

If you don't have the wherewithal to parlay this site into an actual, bona-fide published work, not to mention get a Drudge link....there are people out there who are professional promoters, managers, publicists..... why have you not made use of the appropriate talent experts ? If you don't cultivate a retinue of such specialists, you aren't going to look important enough to derive the requisite compensation.

You didn't even have your own make-up artist when you travelled to C-Span.

You've rejected Maxine's tutiledge, and she could have made you a star by now.

tommy just bought an x box 360tommy is the boy whose computer i usehe and his brother saved and saved for itand last year they saved and saved for a wiimom and dad are happy to buy thembooks and violins and piano lessons etcbut they drew the line at digital games etcso tommy being an enterprising cambridge sorthas been doing odd chores for the neighborswhich in cambridge may be odd indeed but momkeeps an eye on him not to mention theneighbors being french and naturallysuspicious not to mention noseyanyway tommy would like to earn money fromblogging who wouldn tbut even he knows that a blog would never payfor that b m w he wants when he getshis learners permit so he doesn t put too mucheffort into blogging which if you think about itis a very odd chore indeed even if you are a spammer

oooh i just thought of somethingalong with 978000546 othershow bout a sex blog where you sellsex toys on the sidejust don t send any to arkansasbut they don t need them down southcause i ve heard southern womenaresex toys

ooh you know in my last life i was a lech type professorconstantly hitting on grad studentswhich is why i think i m a cockroach this time aroundanyway i had a fling with a girl named gigi clausenat least i think that was her nameyou don t suppose...

gigi had nice legs and was a soprano whose debutwas as the first lady in the magic flute whooogles prince tamino if you remember the plotnow this is getting seriously o tbut you can see how even being as inventive asgigi and i are is not making us a dime

i ll shut up now and let you get back to arguingabout arithmetic and whatever else gigi wantsto dream up

how bout a sex blog where you sellsex toys on the sideThere would be almost no profit margin. With the internet customers can go right to the source.

You need to be able to add value to the product you sell. Many internet-comic sites sell t-shirts or signed prints. And lots of bloggers have published books, but most of them are anthologies and more collectibles than books.

Althouse has threatened to sell stuff, but I don't see her doing it. How weird it must be, to know people will buy stuff from you just because YOU touched it. I can see why someone might NOT want to make money off the internet if it meant doing something like that.

But you see AJ, imprecise commenting can be just as bad as you make various organizations out to be. You perpetrate stereotypes by using statistics and numbers to show how some corporations are evil, but the numbers don't hold up to scrutiny. You've just enhanced a perception while not actually providing any reliable facts.

And then you pointed to Amway as the culprit. Now you've gone from making generic claims to actually tainting the reputation of a company with no factual basis. You may not feel that it matters much if you damage the reputation of some faceless corporation, but you actually do damage to the individuals and distributors who work for Amway.

Indeed, if Amway is actually the company concerning which these bogus stats are made, then you've missed a likely explanation in your vague aspersion. Amway makes many of its sales through in-home distributors. This type of distributorship is typically supplementary income, not intended as a full-time job.

I don't represent a big corporation, so you don't have to fear me suing you; I just want to point out the problem with spreading claims that are meant to teach a moral if in fact there is no data to support it. You've developed a sort of straw man; I can't examine your facts to determine if there are other circumstances or factors to explain numbers that you didn't even bother to verify, and yet, you've managed to feed a perception of the evil corporation with bad data that actually points to a rate closer to minimum wage.

The amazing Mark Penn, who sounds like he knows more about everything than anyone else, has been outed as the Bernie Madoff of advisors for investing your life in made-up new winning schemes. Reality therapy would kill off most of today's believers upon these special stars of the insider advice game. They are the culprits who blow up the Bubbles that always crash.

wowthat was quite an insultinglypollysyllabic endorsement of m l mif i ve ever seen onemakes me want to go right out and sign upto sell those formic acid based cleanerssome ants want to get you to doi think they have a company called antwaybut don t get me wrongi m sure every insect who sells their stuffgets rich from it

I was about to comment on how off Penn was, but then what about product bloggers? There are a whole lot of those. There are also spam-ish blogs that do nothing but redirect to buying products. What if you add those in?Well you know, you're right Freeman. But I would bet a zillion dollars (that I made off my blog in 2008!) that good old Mark Penn most certainly did not have any of them in mind.

blake said: 400,000 was the quote and he is right, not 500,000 and i usually check that before i write. thank you.

Edwards retort that if the GOP included bake sales etc., the economy would be rosier is appropos. the implication was that ebay was an income source that doesn't get counted into the jobless or job creation numbers and with that i hold to what Cheney said and impled.

One foolish thing you do is go halfway in your attempt to monetize (sorry about that word) your Atom feed. Your posts always end with two lines that say "blog advertising" and link to blogads.com. They never actually, you know, contain any ads.

That's fine, AJ. Just thought I'd try to encourage valid dialogue instead of the oh-so-common spewing of made up facts. Your choice how you want to present yourself. I'll just be sure to ignore your hyperbole from now on.

hdhouse, this isn't some debate about politicians and parties, just a request to not make baseless accusations on unverifiable data. AJ said, "They just take a number and make shit up." In fact, he just made numbers up, which showed minimum wage profit rather than his claimed $1800 (or is it $2600, I'm confused). Minimum wage isn't a lot, but some people do live on it. And he didn't bother to provide any corroborating details by which I could examine the accuracy of his statement. You can't complain about spin when you don't bother to get your own facts straight. It's dishonest to try and make a point without providing any verifiable info.

But (and I'm being nice here, responding to your tangent), if Cheney was making stuff up, or spinning data, then he ought to be called on it. It's not clear to me how employment stats are figured, so I can't vouch for the implication of Cheney's statement. However, I would think many ebay sales (those not using ebay as full-time employment), are not reported as income, so it may skew national profit levels somewhat, but I don't see it affecting employment figures. Therefore, I'm not really sure what Cheney's point is.